The Cruise of The Breadwinner (6 page)

“He was so bleedin' low,” Gregson said, “you could have touched his wings. I thought he was goin' to cut me head off. Firing like blazes all the time too. Mowed us down. We was like heap o' bloody dogs on a bone when he'd gone.” He looked over his shoulder for a second. “Know they're both hit bad, don't ye'? You know that?”

The boy nodded and said he thought he could get her started now. Gregson stood back a little and the boy, with a sort of careless strength, pressed his weight down on the starting handle with his right hand. “Think you can match it?” Gregson said. The boy answered with something that was very near to tired contempt. “Can't start first time. You gotta get her swung over.”

“Oh! that's it, is it?” Gregson said. He was fond of telling the boy that he had been brought up in sail. In fact, he had never been brought up in sail. He had always known engines of some sort, mostly old and mostly small and mostly, if he looked back, nothing but trouble. He had never trusted them. And he had suddenly the conviction that he trusted them less than ever now. He stood with his hands spread with large uneasiness over his belly. It was very quiet everywhere except for the sound of rain beating with a hard murmur on the deck; a sound for some reason irritating and unfriendly, so that suddenly he wondered what time it was.

He had not time to pull his watch out of his trousers pocket before the boy had swung the handle of the engine over, and he forgot the watch in his surprise. It did not surprise him that the engine did not fire; he was used to that; but only that the boy had succeeded in swinging it with exactly the knack of the dead engineer. The boy had learnt by heart the ways of the dead man, and the sudden repetition of them seemed to bring him in a curious way
back to life, so that he seemed to be there with them in the absurd and dirty little engine-hole, his face dark with pessimism and long-suffering with pain.

By the time the boy had swung the engine the fourth time Gregson was sour with the conviction that it was never going to fire. The boy leaned his weight on the cylinder head, panting: “No spark in her,” he said. He desired passionately to make the engine go, feeling that in doing so he would become in Gregson's eyes a sort of adult hero. But there was something queer about the engine. “No compression there,” he said.

“Compression, compression!” Gregson said. “Let me have a go.” He had not the faintest idea what compression was. He seized the engine-handle rather as if it had been the key of a clock. When he swung it finally it swirled round, under his immense strength, two or three complete revolutions, swinging him off his balance against the bulkhead.

“Bloody thing never was no good!” he said. “Allus said so. Told him. Miracle it ever went.” He leaned against the bulkhead panting in savage and heavy despair.

The boy did not answer. He was crawling back into the dark recesses behind the engine-cradle, where there was just room enough for him to kneel. He did not know quite what he was looking for. Underneath the engine block lay pools of spent oil in which he knelt as he crawled. It suddenly occurred to him that these pools were too large. He put down his right hand and knew that they were pools of oil and water. Then he stopped crawling and began to run his hands over the engine-block until he found the place where cannon shell had ripped it open in a single jagged hole. A little oil still clogged it there. The force of the shell had lifted up the head, warping it as it blew.

The boy called back to Gregson. From the dark interior Gregson seemed to fill the entire space below the gangway, and it suddenly struck the boy that it was a miracle that he, so large a thing in a little ship, had not been hit.

“We've had it,” he said.

“Had what?” Gregson said. “Whadya mean? What's up?”

The boy crawled out of the hole, suddenly tired, his knees and hands black with oil which he wiped thoughtlessly over his face and in streaks across his almost white hair.

“We've had the engine,” the boy said. “That's what. Cannon shell.”

Gregson lifted his enormous face, swelling the creases of his great neck until they were blown with anger.

“Why'n't they bleedin' well sink us? Why'n't they bleedin' well sink us and have done?”

The boy, hearing the wind rising now with the sound of rain on deck, was sharply aware of a new crisis.

“What do we do now?” he said. He was aware that things might, without the engine, be very tough, very desperate. He licked his lips and tasted the sickliness of oil on them. “What do we do now?”

“Gitta us a cuppa tea,” Gregson roared. “Gitta us a cuppa tea!”

He bawled and raged up the companionway into the beating rain.

The english pilot opened his eyes with a sharp blink, as if he had been lost in a dream and the boy had startled him out of it into the cramped and gloomy world of the little cabin. Messner still lay with eyes closed, his face turned away. The only light in the cabin was from
a single skylight, about a yard square, of opaque glass, over which rain had already thrown a deeper film. In this iron-grey light the pilot looked on the boy as he might have looked on a shape moulded vaguely out of the shadows: as something that moved and had the tangibility of a face, but as otherwise without identity. He regarded the boy also as if there was nothing he could do or wanted to do to change or sharpen his shadowiness. His eyes had dropped deeper into the bruised sockets of his face. As they gazed upwards and followed with reactions that were never quite swift enough the movements of the boy they had on them the same lightless film as the skylight above.

It was some time before he could see clearly enough through the stupor of weakness to grasp that the boy was busy with an object that looked like a torch. This torch, though the boy held it upwards, towards the skylight, and downwards and sideways, towards himself and Messner, never seemed to light. He expected it to flash into his face, but after the boy had swivelled it round two or three times he found himself dazed by angry irritation against it. It became part of the pain buried centrally, like a deep hammer blow, just above his eyes and extending, in a savage cord, to the base of his spine.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

The boy was surprised not by the abruptness of the voice but by its softness. It seemed like a voice from a long way off. It made him feel slightly guilty.

“Not much,” he said.

“Put that torch down,” the pilot said. “Don't wave it about.”

“Not a torch,” the boy said. “Pair of glasses.”

“Glasses?”

“Binoculars. The German's. I found them on deck.”

“Oh,” the pilot said.

“Can't make them work,” the boy said. “Everything looks wrong.”

“Let me look at them,” the pilot said. “They ought to be good, German binoculars.”

He held his hands upward, weakly, without extending his arms, and the boy bent down and gave him the glasses. He let them lie on his chest for some moments and the boy saw it heaving deeply, as if the movement of reaching for the glasses had exhausted him. It seemed quite a long time before he slowly lifted them to his face. Then when he held them there it was without doing anything with them. His hands did not move on the adjustment screws. He rested the eyepieces lightly against the deep sockets of his eyes and simply held them there without a word, in what seemed a dream of tiredness or forgetfulness or pain. It did not occur to the boy that there might be in this long and silent inertia a savage struggle to behave with decent normality, without fuss, to accomplish the simple task of revolving the screws and say something about it without the shadow of even a small agony.

After some longer interval the pilot let the glasses rest slowly back on his chest. To the boy it seemed that he grasped them with extraordinary tightness. He gave a worried sort of smile. It was very quiet and strengthless, but quite calm, and seemed as if it were intended to be reassuring.

“Needs adjustment, that's all,” he said. His words were hard, gasped out quickly. “I can do it. Quite easy. Nice pair.”

He held the glasses hard against his chest and stared straight beyond the boy with a sort of lost vehemence. His eyes seemed to have difficulty in focussing on some
point in very obscure and difficult distance far beyond the varnished pitch-pine walls of the cabin. They were terribly desperate.

But what worried the boy was that the glasses were held also with this same rigid desperation. He waited for some moments for the pilot to give them back to him. Then it became clear that they were not coming back. The pilot grasped them still harder against the blankets which covered him and then shut his eyes.

The boy stood gazing down for some moments, troubled and waiting for something to happen. Suddenly he knew that he was forgotten. It was no use. He remembered the tea. He took a last look at the figure of the pilot lying absolutely still and rigid, grasping the binoculars as he had sometimes seen dying men in pictures grasping a cross, and then pushed the kettle on to the galley fire. He poured the stale cold tea out of the dirty cups into the slop bucket by the galley. He was sick of tea; he was sick of a succession of daily crises in all of which Gregson demanded tea, only to let it get cold without drinking it, and then demanded still more tea as another crisis created itself, letting it get cold again. He jangled the half-dirty cups together on the table, banging them against the pan of peeled potatoes.

About this time Messner turned on his back and began to moan. His lips were very blue and dry but his eyes were not open, so that it seemed as though he were turning and crying in his sleep. The boy heard him with something between sickness and indifference, and ignored him for some moments with callousness. He had made up his mind that the only virtue in Messner was that he owned the binoculars. He regarded him at the same time with a certain distant awe. Messner was an enemy; so that even though you had never seen him before in your life he was a wrong,
criminal, despicably cruel, dynamically dangerous person. It was men like Messner who came in low over the sand-dunes, the sea-marshes and the little towns of the coast, using cannon-shell at low range on whatever living thing they could find. There was no doubt about that; the boy had seen it happen. It was perfectly acceptable that Messner was no different from the rest of them; but when after a time Messner ceased moaning for an interval and lay rigid on his back and staring upward with quiet lips there did not seem very much difference in the appearance of the two men lying on the floor.

Reluctantly making fresh tea at last, the boy remembered that he ought to call Gregson. He went to the bottom of the companionway and shouted, “Mr. Gregson, skipper, tea!” But there was no movement and no answering shout above the sound of rain. Also, as he looked upward and saw the rain flicking in steady white drizzle across the section of dark sky, he felt there was something odd about
The Breadwinner
, and when he had taken two or three steps up the companionway he saw what it was. He saw that Gregson had rigged a sail. The boy went slowly on deck and marvelled at this strange copper-brown triangle with a sort of reluctant wonder. He had never seen it before. It gave to the dumpy, war-painted
Breadwinner
an exciting loftiness; it made her seem a larger ship. It even seemed to dwarf the enormous figure of Gregson, pressing his belly rather harder than usual against the wheel, the peak of his cap rather harder down on his head.

“Tea, Mr. Gregson,” the boy said. “Just made.”

“Ain't got time!” Gregson roared at him.

The boy stood in the attitude of someone stunned on his feet; he was more shocked than he had been by the sight of the dead engineer. He stared at the face of Gregson pressing
itself forward with a sort of pouted savagery against the driving rain, eyes popped forward, chin sunk hard into doubled and redoubled folds of inflamed flesh on the collar of his jersey. It was some moments before he could think of anything to say.

“Just ready,” he said at last. It did not seem remotely credible that Gregson could reject tea. “I can bring it up.”

“Ain't got time I tell yer!” Gregson said. “Ain't got time for nothing. That wind's gittin' up. Look at that sea too! Look at it! We gotta git them chaps in.”

The boy turned and saw, for the first time since the shooting, what had happened to the weather. Rain and wind beating up the Channel had already ploughed the sea into shallow and ugly troughs of foam. The distances had narrowed in, so that the skyline was no longer divisible from the smoky and shortened space of sea. Overhead he saw lumpy masses of rain-cloud skidding north-eastward. “Another hour and it'll blow your guts out!” Gregson said. “We went too far west. I knowed it.” He had nursed the old superstitions in his mind, placing them against events. The boy remembered the desperate sarcasms of the dead Jimmy, appealing for a second auxiliary, but he said nothing. It was too late now.

“You git below,” Gregson said, “and look after them two.

“Yes.”

“Well, don't stand there!”

The boy was startled by the fury of Gregson's words and turned instantly and went back to the companionway. As he did so he saw the covered heap of the dead engineer's body, blackened now with rain, the blood washed into diluted and glistening blotches of crimson on the wet deck,
and this forlorn heap of deathliness that somehow still did not seem dead brought back suddenly all the chaos and terror of the thing, all the nearness and all the pain. He went below in a cold black sweat and stood at the table and poured himself tea and drank it in hot violent gulps of relief. The boat had begun to sway a little, in short brisk lurches, still shallow. Already they were increasing and he knew they would not stop now. Soon she would pitch forward too, and if the wind rose enough she would fall into the regular violence of double pitch and roll that would not cease until she was within half a mile of shore.